Part 26
From a military, as from a financial, point of view this result is of advantage to the government, whether it be imperial or republican; but it is hostile to the character of a nation, morally and æsthetically. In its best aspect, the state is like a parent who seeks to play Providence to his offspring, to foresee and ward off all accident and all evil, and to provide for all possible contingencies, bad and good. As the parent inevitably fails in doing this, so the state fails, and must fail, in such a task.
Strikes, with their concomitant evils, are only another form of tyranny; but they have this good in them—that they are opposed to the tyranny of the state, and tend to lessen it by the unpleasant shock which they give to its self-conceit and self-complacency. Trades-unions turn to their own purposes the lesson which the state has taught them—_i.e._, a brutal sacrifice of individual will and welfare to a despotic majority.
There is more or less truth and justification in all revolutions because they are protests against bureaucracy. When they are successful, they abjure their own origin and become in their turn the bureaucratic tyranny, sometimes modified, sometimes exaggerated, but always tending towards reproduction of that which they destroyed. And the bureaucratic influence is always immoral and unwholesome, were it only in the impatience which it excites in all courageous men and the apathy to which it reduces all those who are without courage. Its manifold and emasculating commands are to all real strength as the cords in which Gulliver was bound by the pygmies.
The state only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which its demands are obeyed and its exchequer is filled. Its highest attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties which require liberal treatment and spacious expansion inevitably dry up and perish. Take a homely instance. A poor, hard-working family found a little stray dog; they took it in, sheltered, fed it, and attached themselves to it; it was in one of the streets of London; the police after a time summoned them for keeping a dog without a licence; the woman, who was a widow, pleaded that she had taken it out of pity, that they had tried to lose it, but that it always came back to them; she was ordered to pay the amount of the dog-tax and two guineas’ costs; _i.e._, the state said to her: ‘Charity is the costliest of indulgences; you are poor; you have no right to be humane.’ The lesson given by the state was the vilest and meanest which could be given. This woman’s children, growing up, will remember that she was ruined for being kind; they will harden their hearts, in accordance with the lesson; if they become brutal to animals and men, it is the state which will have made them so.
All the state’s edicts in all countries inculcate similar egotism; generosity is in its sight a lawless and unlawful thing: it is so busied in urging the use of disinfectants and ordering the destruction of buildings and of beasts, the exile of families and the closing of drains, that it never sees the logical issue of its injunctions, which is to leave the sick man alone and flee from his infected vicinity: it is so intent on insisting on the value of state education that it never perceives that it is enjoining on the child to advance itself at any cost and leave its procreators to starve in their hovel. The virtues of self-sacrifice, of disinterested affection, of humanity, of self-effacement, are nothing to it; by its own form of organism it is debarred from even admiring them; they come in its way; they obstruct it; it destroys them.
Mr Ruskin, in one of the papers of his _Fors Clavigera_, speaks of an acacia tree, young and beautiful, green as acacias only are green in Venice, where no dust ever is; it grew beside the water steps of the Academy of the Arts and was a morning and evening joy to him. One day he found a man belonging to the municipality cutting it down root and branch. ‘Why do you murder that tree?’ he asked. The man replied, ‘_Per far pulizia_’ (to clean the place). The acacia and the municipality of Venice are an allegory of the human soul and its controller, the state. The acacia was a thing of grace and verdure, a sunrise and sunset pleasure to a great soul; it had fragrance in its white blossoms and shade in its fair branches; it fitly accompanied the steps which lead to the feasts of Carpaccio and the pageants of Gian Bellini. But in the sight of the Venetian municipality it was irregular and unclean. So are all the graces and greenness of the human soul to the state, which merely requires a community tax-paying, decree-obeying, uniform, passionless, enduring as the ass, meek as the lamb, with neither will nor wishes; a featureless humanity practising the goose-step in eternal routine and obedience.
When the man has become a passive creature, with no will of his own, taking the military yoke unquestioningly, assigning his property, educating his family, holding his tenures, ordering his daily life, in strict accord with the regulations of the state, he will have his spirit and his individuality annihilated, and he will, in compensation to himself, be brutal to all those over whom he has power. The cowed conscript of Prussia becomes the hectoring bully of Alsace.[O]
Footnote O:
Whoever may care to study the brutal treatment of conscripts and soldiers in Germany by their officers is referred to the revelations published this year by Kurt Abel and Captain Miller, both eye-witnesses of these tortures.
‘_Libera chiesà in libero stato_’ is the favourite stock phrase of Italian politicians; but it is an untruth—nay, an impossibility—not only in Italy, but in the whole world. The church cannot be liberal because liberality stultifies itself; the state cannot be liberal because its whole existence is bound up with dominion. In all the political schemes which exist now, working themselves out in actuality, or proposed as a panacea to the world, there is no true liberality; there is only a choice between despotism and anarchy. In religious institutions it is the same; they are all egotisms in disguise. Socialism wants what it calls equality; but its idea of equality is to cut down all tall trees that the brushwood may not feel itself overtopped. Plutocracy, like its almost extinct predecessor, aristocracy, wishes, on the other hand, to keep all the brushwood low, so that it may grow above it at its own pace and liking. Which is the better of the two?
Civil liberty is the first quality of a truly free life; and in the present age the tendency of the state is everywhere to admit this in theory, but to deny it in practice. To be able to go through the comedy of the voting-urn is considered privilege enough to atone for the loss of civil and moral freedom in all other things. If it be true that a nation has the government which it deserves to have, then the merits of all the nations are small indeed. With some the state assumes the guise of a police officer, and in others of a cuirassier, and in others of an attorney; but in all it is a despot issuing its petty laws with the pomp of Jove; thrusting its truncheon, or its sword, or its quill into the heart of domestic life, and breaking the backbone of the man who has spirit enough to resist it. The views of the state are like those of the Venetian municipality concerning the acacia. Its one aim is a methodical, monotonous, mathematically-measured regularity: it admits of no expansion; it tolerates no exceptions; of beauty it has no consciousness; of any range beyond that covered by its own vision it is ignorant. It may work on a large scale—even on an enormous scale—but it cannot work on a great one. Greatness can be the offspring alone of volition and of genius: it is everywhere the continual effort of the state to coerce the one and to suffocate the other.
The fatal general conception of the state as an abstract entity, free from all mortal blemish, and incapable of error, is the most disastrous misconception into which the mind of man could possibly have fallen. If the human race would only understand, and take the trouble to realise, that government by the state can be nothing better than government by a multitude of clerks, it would cease to be enamoured of this misconception. Government, absolute and unelastic, by a million of Bumbles, the elevation to supreme and most meddlesome power of a Bureaucracy employing an army of spies and informers in its service; this is all that the rule of the state can ever be, or can ever mean, for mankind. It is impossible that it should ever be otherwise.
Were there some neighbouring planet, populated by demi-gods or some angels, from whom the earth could obtain a superior race to undertake its rule, the domination of this superior race might be beneficial, though it is questionable whether it would, even then, be agreeable. Socialism calls itself liberty, but it is the negation of liberty, since it would permit the state, _i.e._, the bureaucracy, to enter into and ordain every item of private or of public life. The only sect which has any conception of liberty is that which is called Individualism, and it is singular and lamentable how few followers Individualism obtains. It is due, perhaps, to the fact that so few human beings possess any individuality.
The mass of men are willing to be dominated, have no initiative, no ambition, no moral courage; it is easier to them to join a herd and be driven on with it; it saves them thought and responsibility. Were Individualism general, there would be no standing armies, there would be no affiliation to secret societies, there would be no formation of the public mind by the pressure of a public press, there would be no acceptance of the dicta of priests and physicians, there would be no political councils, there would be no ministers of education. But Individualism is extremely rare, whether as a quality or a doctrine. Where it does exist, as in Tolstoï or Auberon Herbert, it is regarded by the mass of men as abnormal, as something approaching a disease. Yet it will be the resistance of Individualism which will alone save the world (if it be saved indeed) from the approaching slavery of that tyranny of mediocrity which is called the authority of the state. For government by the state merely means government by multitudes of hired, blatant, pompous official servants, such as we are now blessed with; but with the powers of those official servants indefinitely extended until the tentacles of the state should stretch out like that of the octopus and draw into its maw all human life.
No one who studies the signs of the times can fail to be struck by the growing tendency to invoke the aid of what is called the state in all matters; and those who would be alarmed and disgusted at the despotism of a single ruler, are disposed meekly to accept the despotism of the impalpable, impersonal and most dangerous legislator. No one who has observed the action of a bureaucracy can, without dread, see its omnipotence desired; for the fact cannot be too often repeated, that the omnipotence of the state is the omnipotence of its minions in a multitude of greater or smaller offices throughout the country cursed by them. Through whom can the espionage which is necessary to secure the working of permissive bills, of total abstinence laws, of muzzling regulations, of medical and hygienic interference, be exercised, and the vast machinery of fines and dues which accompany these be manipulated, except by hordes of officials gaining their livelihood by torturing the public?
The state is always spoken of as if it were an impersonal force, magnified into semi-divinity of more than mortal power and prescience, wholly aloof from all human error, and meteing out the most infallible justice from the purest balance. Instead of that the state is nothing, can be nothing, more than a host of parasites fastened on the body politic, more or less fattening thereon, and trained to regard the public as a mere taxable entity, always in the wrong and always to be preyed upon at pleasure. It may be unintelligible why mankind ever laid its head under the heel of a single human tyrant, but it is surely more perplexing still why it lies down under the feet of a million of government spies and scriveners. That there is a singular increase in public pusillanimity everywhere is unquestionable; its outcome is the tendency, daily increasing, to look to the government in every detail and every difficulty.
THE PENALTIES OF A WELL-KNOWN NAME
When in childhood, if we be made of the stuff which dreams ambitious dreams, we see the allegorical figure of Fame blowing her long trumpet down the billowy clouds, we think how delightful and glorious it must be to have a name which echoes from that golden clarion. Nothing seems to us worth the having, except a share in that echoing windy blast. To be famous: it is the vision of all poetic youth, of all ambitious energies, of all struggling and unrecognised talent. To be picked out by the capricious goddess and lifted up from the crowd to sit beside her on her throne of cloud, seems to the fancy of youth the loftiest and loveliest of destinies.
In early youth we know not what we do, we cannot measure all we part with in seeking the publicity which accompanies success; we do not realise that the long trumpet of our goddess Fame will mercilessly blow away our dearest secrets to the ears of all, and so strain and magnify them that they will be no more recognised by us, though become the toy of all. We do not appreciate, until we have lost it, the delightful unregarded peace with which the obscure of this world can love, hate, caress, curse, move, sit still, be sick, be sorry, be gay or glad, bear their children, bury their dead, unnoted, untormented unobserved.
It is true that celebrity has its pleasant side. To possess a name which is an open sesame wherever it is pronounced is not only agreeable, but is often useful. It opens doors easily, whether they be of palaces or of railway stations; it saves you from arrest if you be sketching fortifications; it obtains attention for you from every one, from ministers to innkeepers; in a word, it marks you as something out of the common, not lightly to be meddled with, or neglected with impunity. It has its practical uses and its daily advantages, if it have also this prosaic drawback, that, like other conspicuous personages, you pay fifty per cent. dearer than ordinary people for everything which you consume.
Fame, like position, has its ugly side; whatever phase of it be taken, whatever celebrity, notoriety, distinction, or fashion, it brings its own penalties with it, and it may be that these penalties underweigh its pleasures.
The most cruel of its penalties is the loss of privacy which it entails; the difficulty which it raises to the enjoyment of free and unobserved movement. Whether the owner of a well-known name desire privacy for the rest of solitude, for the indulgence of some affection of which it is desired that the world shall know nothing, for the sake of repose, and ease, or for the pursuit of some especial study, the _incognito_ sighed for is almost always impossible to obtain.
Find the most retired and obscure of places, amidst hills where no foot but the herdsman’s treads, and pastures which feel no step but those of the cattle, a mountain or forest nook which you fondly believe none but yourself and one other know of as existing on the face of the globe; yet brief will be your and your companion’s enjoyment of it if your lives, or one of your lives, be famous; the press will track you like a sleuth-hound, and all your precautions will be made as naught, and, indifferent to the harm they do or the misery they create, the Paul Prys of broadsheets will let in the glare of day upon your dusky, mossy dell.
The artist has, no doubt, in this much for which to blame himself: why does the dramatist deign to bow from his box? why does the composer salute his audience? why does the painter have shows at his studio? why does the great writer tell his confidences to the newspaper hack?
Because they are afraid of creating the enmity and the unpopularity which would be engendered by their refusal. Behind this vulgar, intrusive espionage and examination there lies the whole force of the malignity of petty natures and inferior minds, _i.e._, two thirds of the world. The greater is afraid of the lesser; the giant fears the sling or the stone of the pigmy; he is alone, and the pigmies are multitudinous as the drops in the sea.
We give away the magic belt which makes us invisible, without knowing in the least all that we give away with it: all that delightful independence and repose which are the portion of the _humbles de la terre_, who, all the same, do not value it, do not appreciate it; do not, indeed, ever cease from dissatisfaction at it In their ignorance they think how glorious it must be to stand in the white blaze of the electric light of celebrity; how enviable and delightful it surely is to move forever in a buzz of wondering voices and a dust of rolling chariots, never to stir unchronicled and never to act uncommented. Hardly can one persuade them of the treasure which they possess in their own obscurity? If we tell them of it, they think we laugh at them or lie.
Privacy is the necessity of good and great art, as it is the corollary of dignity and decorum of life. But it is bought with a price; it is bought by incurring the dislike and vindictiveness of all who are checked in their petty malice and prying curiosity and are sent away from closed doors.
The ideal literary life is that of Michelet; the ideal artistic life is that of Corot. Imagine the one leaving the song of the birds and the sound of the seas to squabble at a Copyright Congress, or the other leaving his green trees and his shining waters to pour out the secrets with which nature had intrusted him in the ear of a newspaper reporter! If a correspondent of the press had hidden behind an elder-bush on a grassy path at Shottery, methinks Shakespeare would have chucked him into the nearest ditch; and if a stenographer had inquired of Dante what meats had tasted so bitter to him at Can Grande’s table, beyond a doubt the meddler would have learned the coldness and the length of a Florentine rapier. But then no one of these men was occupied with his own personality, none of them had the restless uneasiness, the morbid fear, which besets the modern hero, lest, if his contemporaries do not prate of him, generations to come will know naught of him.
In modern life also, the fox, with his pen and ink hidden under his fur, creeps in, wearing the harmless skin of a familiar house-dog, and the unhappy hare or pullet, who has received, caressed, and fed him without suspicion, sees too late an account of the good nature and of his habitation travestied and sent flying on a news sheet to the four quarters of the globe. Against treachery of this kind there is no protection possible. All that can be done is to be very slow in giving or allowing introductions; very wary in making new acquaintances, and wholly indifferent to the odium incurred by being called exclusive.
Interrogation is always ill-bred; and an intrusion that takes the form of a prolonged interrogation is an intrusion so intolerable that any rudeness whatever is justifiable in its repression.
The man of genius gives his work, his creation, his _alter ego_, to the world, whether it be in political policy, in literary composition, in music, sculpture, painting, or statuary. This the world has full right to judge, to examine, to applaud, or to condemn; but beyond this, into the pale of his private life it has no possible title to entry. It is said in the common jargon of criticism that without knowing the habits, temperament, physique and position of the artist, it is impossible to correctly judge his creation. It is, on the contrary, a hindrance to the unbiassed judgment of any works to be already prejudiced _per_ or _contra_ by knowledge of the accidents and attributes of those who have produced them. It is a morbid appetite, as well as a vulgar taste, that makes the public invade the privacy of those who lead, instruct, or adorn their century, and these last have themselves to thank, in a great measure, for the pests which they have let loose.
Every day any one who bears a name in any way celebrated receives requests or questions from persons who are unknown to him, demanding his views on everything from Buddhism to blacking, and inquiring into every detail of his existence, from his personal affections to his favourite dish at dinner. If he deign to answer them, he is as silly as the senders.
Sometimes you will hear that a town has been named after you in America, or Australia, or Africa; it is usually a few planks laid down in a barren plain, and you are expected to be grateful that your patronymic will be shouted on a siding as the railway train rushes by it. Sometimes an enthusiastic and unknown letter writer will implore you to tell him or her ‘everything’ about yourself, from your birth onwards; and if, as you will certainly do if you are in your senses, you consign the impudent appeal to the waste-paper basket, your undesired correspondent will probably fill up the _lacuna_ from his or her own imagination. Were all this the offspring of genuine admiration, it might be in a measure excused, though it would always be ill-bred, noxious and odious. But it is either an impertinent curiosity or a desire to make money.
The moment that your name is well known, the demands made upon you will be as numerous as they will be imperative. Though you may never have given any permission or any data for a biography, the fact will not prevent hundreds of biographies appearing about you: that they are fictitious and unauthorised matters nothing either to those who publish or to those who read. Descriptions, often wholly inaccurate, of your habits, your tastes, your appearance, your manner of life, will be put in circulation, no matter how offensive or how injurious to you they may be. Your opinions will be demanded by strangers whose only object is to obtain for themselves some information which they can turn to profit. From the frequency or rarity of your dreams to the length of your menu at dinner, nothing will escape the insatiable appetite of an unwholesome and injurious inquisitiveness. Obscure nonentities from Missouri or Nevada will imagine that they honour you by writing that they have baptised their brats in your name, and requesting some present or acknowledgment in return for their unwelcome effrontery in taking you as an eponymus.
It is probable, nay, I think, certain, that in no epoch of the world’s history was prominence in any art or any career ever rendered so extremely uncomfortable as in ours, never so heavily handicapped with the observation and penalty-weight of inquisitive misrepresentation. All the inventions of the age tend to increase a thousandfold all that minute examination of and impudent interference with others which were alive in the race in the days of Miltiades and Socrates, but which has now, in its so-called scientific toys, the means of gratifying this mischievous propensity in an infinitely greater and more dangerous degree.